Chapter Ten
Back then
Brad rang at six in the morning London time, which meant he either hadn’t accounted for the time difference before he decided to call, or he hadn’t been to sleep in the last two days and was running on cocaine and coffee.
“What’s going on, Brad?”
“Better Half wants you in for a chemistry read.”
Tristan reared upright at the name of the project. It was on top of his WANT list.
He’d read the script in one sitting back in February, then he’d gone all out on his taped audition.
He set himself up as a proper influencer, with a ring light and an iPhone on a tripod, and played Ben filming a cheery little cooking video for an audience that worshipped him.
He held his voice breathy and intimate, the risotto kept catching, and Ben beamed down the lens through every fumble.
Then, mid-sentence, still smiling, he laid his palm flat to the hob’s hot ring and held it there.
Tristan had understood, the moment he read that bit of the script, that Ben had done it because the risotto had caught and the scene wasn’t perfect. Tristan knew exactly what it was to make yourself pay for falling short.
“Who’s the asshole husband?”
“Daniel Birrell.”
Tristan’s stomach turned over. Birrell didn’t usually do television.
The man did films where he vanished into the character, then gave interviews about his process and the on-set tensions his method acting caused.
If Birrell was attached, then somebody had already mapped the whole awards run: the autumn festival bow, the FYC billboards along Sunset, the category they’d submit him in.
“They’re reading shortlisted people next week,” Brad went on.
“You’re top of the list for Ben, Tris. The director’s seen your Disney stuff.
He thinks the contrast is the whole point, and he likes the idea of pulling a McConaissance.
He wants the pretty boy nobody takes seriously, right up until they have to.
Tris, you need to do whatever it takes to land this.
I mean it. You walk in, you read like your life’s on the line, and if the room wants more, I don’t care if you’ve gotta go full casting couch and blow every exec between here and Burbank.
Take it as rehearsal. You’re playing a guy who does it for a living, anyway. ”
Tristan dropped back against the pillows. “That’s the most motivating thing you’ve ever said to me, Brad. In all the years we’ve worked together.”
“Yeah. I missed my real calling as a cult leader.”
“For the record, I’ve never done anything like that.” He rolled onto his side, into the hot stripe the early sun was now laying across the duvet. “But I want this, Brad. I’m not above desperate measures.”
Brad chuckled. “You’re telling me your ass is still cherry? Twenty years in this business and nobody’s popped it?”
“No.”
“Not even with a finger or a tongue?”
“No, Brad.”
“You were a teen idol. There were grown men running fan accounts counting down to your eighteenth birthday.”
“My mum chaperoned every set I ever stood on.” Tristan turned onto his back. “She never once left me alone with anyone she didn’t vet first.”
Brad snorted. “Yeah. She was a total tiger mom.”
“She was a fucking saint, Brad,” Tristan corrected him.
“…Right. Anyway.” Brad, who had never knowingly sat through a feeling, moved them along. “I’ll email you the details for the read.” The line went dead.
Tristan leapt out of bed and punched the air. This would be his first real read in eighteen months, opposite Daniel Birrell for fuck’s sake, for a part he’d be willing to crawl over glass to get. He paced a tight circle on the cold floor, shaking out his hands.
Then he got back to work.
The script for Better Half had lived on his nightstand since he’d first opened it. Its spine was broken in and a third of its pages were flagged with coloured tabs. He carried it to the window and thumbed through to the scenes he’d marked.
Ben Halloran was flamboyantly gay, and the smiling curator of a glossy life that he livestreamed to a hundred thousand devoted followers, one perfectly risen sourdough loaf at a time.
He and his husband were the gays the far right could live with: domestic and gendered.
Ben wore the apron and kept the house; the husband looked after their crypto portfolio and had enough opinions for the both of them, sinking a little further into the manosphere with every episode.
Between them they were proof on demand that nobody in the far right was a bigot, only staunch traditionalists.
Off-camera, the marriage Ben sold as perfect was actually a stranglehold, every decision his husband’s. Online, the audience came at him from both sides at once: the followers who worshipped the fantasy, and the pile-on from those who called him a sell-out and a relic for living the trad life.
It was a divisive topic, subversive, and topical to the point of being radioactive. In short, it was fucking award bait.
None of it would do a thing for the pretty-boy problem; Halloran was, if anything, the prettiest box he’d ever be asked to stand in. But Tristan thought he could carry the typecasting a lot more cheerfully with a BAFTA on the mantelpiece.
He propped the script on the sill, open to a favourite scene, and picked up his mobile. The director wanted a pretty boy he could remake into a serious thespian. Tristan could be that.
He opened his chat thread with Caroline and started to type.
? ? ?
Benton was an artist when it came to media manipulation, and could have made a killing in celebrity public relations.
He produced a Gantt chart printed on Clarence House stationery. The engraved letterhead presided over a grid of colour-coded bars that mapped Tristan’s entire fake courtship out by the week.
“Phase one is proximity without contact,” Benton said, uncapping a pen and using it as a pointer.
“We establish that you move in adjacent circles. Favourability with the under-thirty-fives is already soft in your direction, Mr Whitlock. The Disney cohort has aged into the demographic, and they remember you fondly. We want to compound that good will.”
Caroline had her chin in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. When Benton said compound that good will, she bit down on her bottom lip.
“Phase two is a controlled sighting.” Benton turned a page and tapped it with his pen.
“Same venue, separate exits, no shared frame. We let the speculation generate the story, which polls considerably better than a story we’ve handed them.
The public don’t like to feel like their emotions are being toyed with.
By phase three, approval scores permitting, we allow precisely one photograph together. ”
“You’re going to be tracking approval scores?” Tristan asked.
“There are metrics, Mr Whitlock.” Benton’s brow furrowed. “You can’t improve what you don’t track. I’ve set out target projections for the key metrics in Appendix C. Did you not do the pre-read?”
Caroline sighed into her wine. Tristan looked at her, then at Benton, who had already moved his pen to the next coloured bar with no idea he’d just reduced a Princess of the United Kingdom to a woman in genuine danger of slipping clean off her chair.
The first sighting wasn’t a sighting at all.
Mary Fenton, some baronet’s daughter Caroline had known since pony club, posted a photo from the Cartier event at Spencer House, the two of them cheek to cheek over their champagne.
And there, three feet behind Caroline’s left shoulder, slightly out of focus and mid-laugh with a man who ran a gallery in Mayfair, was Tristan.
It took under an hour for the comments to start rolling in. is that the disney guy?? behind Caro?? Then a screenshot, cropped and circled, migrating to a royal-watcher account with forty thousand followers.
“That’s actually worked?” Tristan asked, on the mobile the next morning. “We’re not even acknowledging each other!”
“That is rather the point, Mr Whitlock.” There was a pause while Benton decided how much of the obvious he’d have to spell out. “A staged photograph reads as a staged photograph. An accident reads as the truth.”
? ? ?
The members’ club appearance came a week later.
Tristan left first, at eleven, into a black cab that turned south towards the river.
Caroline left four minutes after him, into a different cab going somewhere else entirely.
Nobody watching them go could have sworn they’d so much as breathed the same air inside, and the photographs of both departures proved nothing while implying a great deal.
Then Tristan’s cab looped back through the dark, dropped him at a side gate, and a security officer walked him into Clarence House without a single word beyond his polite greeting.
Caroline was already in her socks. Benton had shed his tie and pushed his sleeves up as he sat sprawled in an ancient armchair. A bottle of red sat breathing on the table between them.
They spent the rest of that night together, watching Cheers, then Frasier, because Benton admitted, without quite meeting anyone’s eye, that he’d never seen an episode.
“You’ve never…Caroline. He’s never seen Frasier.”
“He’s a deeply unwell man, Tristan. I keep telling you.” Caroline smoothed a hand over Benton’s chest, flattening his shirt against him. “I’ve really scraped the bottom of the barrel here.”
By midnight Tristan was on his second glass and translating the Americanisms.
“Okay, a fanny pack.” Their faces stopped him dead. “…What?”
“Nothing,” Caroline managed. “Do continue.”
“It’s a little bag that you wear on your waist. For your keys, your mobile—”
“We call it a bum bag,” Benton said.
Tristan frowned, turning the phrase over in his head. “Why not an arse bag?”
Benton blinked rapidly as he thought this through, his glass tilting forgotten in his hand. “I don’t…” All his previous confidence had leached out of his voice. “I don’t know.”
It wrecked him. Tristan watched the single most composed man he’d ever met come apart over this inconsistency of language, and felt bad about it.
Caroline set her wine down and pulled Benton in against her, one hand moving in circles between his shoulder blades. “I know, my love,” she murmured into his hair. “I know. Some things just aren’t ours to understand.”